Morris

SAN BERNARDINO – An effort to get Mayor Pat Morris to speak from the dais about the ongoing federal investigation at San Bernardino International Airport was thwarted Monday night at the City Council meeting.

A draft environmental impact report for a controversial underground water storage project in the Cadiz Valley of the Mojave Desert has been released and is available for public comment.

The project, first proposed in 2001, would involve burying 44 miles of pipeline to move surplus Colorado River water to an underground basin the size of Rhode Island. The water rights under 35,000 acres belong to Cadiz Inc., which also wants to tap water from beneath nearby dry lake beds that it says would otherwise be lost to evaporation.

Jon Stweart

December 05, 2011 6:30 PM Natasha Lindstrom, Staff Writer

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who represents Apple Valley and Hesperia, will be featured Monday night in a segment on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” according to a spokeswoman for Donnelly.

For all the questions about its management and cost, this much is clear about high-speed rail: Californians who authorized the project three years ago want a do-over, according to a new Field Poll, and by a wide margin they want to vote “no.”

Dan Walters

When the California High-Speed Rail Authority released a much-revised “business plan” for the project that doubled its cost, it won praise in many quarters, including this one, for moving from abject fantasy into at least semi-reality.

The governor, announcing a signature-gathering effort to place a measure to raise income and sales taxes on the November 2012 ballot, says he wants to avoid partisan gridlock in the Capitol.

By Anthony York, Los Angeles Times December 5, 2011, 10:24 p.m.

Reporting from Sacramento— In what he called an end-run around Sacramento’s partisan gridlock, Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday unveiled his bid to raise taxes on high earners and boost the sales tax by a half-cent for the next five years.

SACRAMENTO — With 2011 nearing a close, California lawyers must be wondering which will arrive first: Gov. Jerry Brown’s first trial court appointments or Santa Claus.

Nearly a full year into his administration, Brown has named just one jurist — albeit a very high-profile one — to the bench: Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu. Meanwhile, vacancies in the superior and appellate courts have gone unfilled and totaled 62 at the end of October, the latest figure available from the Administrative Office of the Courts. The vacancy rate is nearing a two-year high.